Happy summer! (Just kidding, I hate summer.) It’s time for my monthly effort to close all my open browser tabs before the End Times.

Bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress and many more) talks about being both Black and Jewish in this 2022 profile from The Jewish Chronicle (hat tip to Noah Berlatsky). What stood out for me was his tough-love advice about perseverance as a writer:

“I tell writers all the time: ‘Listen, you got to write every day, you got to just keep writing and writing and writing.’ They say, ‘Well, this isn’t any good.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good. You just keep writing.

“You think when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace — the first word he wrote down — that it was good? No, it was not!”

After close to 50 novels, he’s not stopping.

“It’s like people who love boxing,” he says. “Who loves being hit? There are people who really like it… and it’s like that.”

Yes, writing is my kink, and I bottom for novels…

At Electric Lit, Jacqueline Alnes interviews Sarah Chihaya about her memoir Bibliophobia, which, among other things, describes how academia engenders an extractive approach to literature that can kill the pleasure of open-ended discovery. Chihaya says:

Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.

This resonated with me because the self-hating voice in my head is usually nattering on about why anything I’m doing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

Lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage gave this inspiring 6-minute speech at Bar Harbor Pride about the link between joy and resistance. When we work together to resist oppression, we create a more meaningful life for ourselves, which liberates our capacity for joy. Gage reminds us to look up the histories of our queer elders for examples–a frequent subject of her plays, which have foregrounded historical lesbians and butches such as geneticist Barbara McClintock, Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and actress Eva Le Gallienne. She quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, saying that if we’re not uncomfortable with some of the people in our coalition, it’s not broad enough. I especially appreciate Gage saying this as a radical feminist, because that community has too often indulged their discomfort with masculinity to exclude trans folks.

Did you know that the term “drag queen” was pioneered by William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who organized pageants and drag balls for Black queer men in 19th-century Washington, DC? Watch this 3-minute video from the Black Gay History Channel to learn more. (Hat tip to Robert Jones, Jr.)

In this 2016 essay in Guts Magazine, “Forgiving the Future,” Laura Shepherd reflects on the Tarot’s Death card and the bittersweet emotions of transitioning in midlife.

In the wake of increased and widespread attention to the trans experience in popular culture, I began to feel like the future was already happening…

Suddenly, it seems, people don’t spend half a century in the closet for being trans anymore. The stories we tell now—of coming out loud, proud, young, and beautiful—render my own story a homely tale of timidity. That I climbed out from under the weight of an almost universal narrative of denial to become proud to be trans is, these days, like having taken the scenic route to travel a great distance—as though I was simply fearful of highway speed. That it was for a long time unfathomable to live as we do now is close to irrelevant. That’s what it feels like to me, at my age, being part of a larger movement so much younger, so brazen in motion, with more room to move—space created in part, I sometimes forget, by lived experiences like my own.

Instead, I grieve that I don’t get to be young and be me.

Social worker Griffin Hansbury writes about the value of bad feelings in “Be the Brick: Notes Toward Thinking About the Clinical Value of Trans Negativity,” published in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues last month. The brick, here, is the one thrown to start the Stonewall Riot.

As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance…

Trans people, like other queers, feel pressure to be happy, normal, assimilated; but rage, shame, alienation endure. Refusing such affects can mean feeling worse: I should feel okay (happy, normal), but I don’t, so something’s really wrong with me. But why should we feel okay when trans-antagonism persists (past and present)?

For a book-length exploration of this theme, see Hil Malatino’s Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which my transmasc book group read last year.

Some poetry that struck a chord with me this month:

“Fauna” by Richard Siken, at The Shore Poetry, makes the Elks Club more surreal by taking it literally, as a symbol of an older generation of men’s unspoken inner damage. “Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact.”

In Rattle, Cam McGlynn’s “Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits” is pure pun-filled fun about human and avian mating. “I’ve yet to check a European Shag/off my life list and now that I’m married,/I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance…”

Abby E. Murray’s “I Can’t Find My Gender,” in One Art, uses wistful humor to depict the gap between knowing one’s self and being legible to others. Hat tip to the e-newsletter from Perugia Press, which published Murray’s excellent poetry collection about being a military spouse, Hail and Farewell.

…I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be…

Another Perugia Press poet, Lisa Allen Ortiz, understands why new purchases can make me sad, because I’m already mourning their wear and tear, their future unwantedness. In “Furniture,” published in Sixth Finch, she muses:

Last week my friend Farnaz
taught me the term
anticipatory grief
meaning we’re sad now for a thing
that will happen
later.
Imagine that.

Thi Nguyen’s “In the Time of Tuberculosis,” at Frontier Poetry, describes intersecting assaults on her well-being, from the illness that the doctors initially dismissed, to being locked in the ward when it progressed to a dangerous point–all this occurring against the backdrop of the 2016 election.

She had forgotten
that when she left Viet Nam
30 years ago, she was once dirty.
Given the TB vaccine,
she was made clean.
She was once an outsider
allowed to be let in.

I was born in the US.
I was born clean
but now I am dirty.
I’ve dirtied others.
I am not allowed outside,
I am kept inside, the door locked
from the outside.

And finally, some fine prose links:

In “Residential School Requiem,” an excerpt from D.A. Navoti’s memoir-in-progress, published in Craft Literary, the author walks through a park on the site of the Phoenix Indian School that his grandmother was forced to attend, pondering what is memorialized and what is left out.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School.

In fractured lit, Anais Godard’s “The Clay of It” is a sweet and surprising flash fiction about the nature of intimacy.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

Queer nerd fan site Geeks Out interviewed Andrew Joseph White, whose horror fiction foregrounds transmasculine and autistic characters. I’ve read two of his powerful novels, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and an ARC of the forthcoming You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. Body horror in the service of social justice, these books hold nothing back.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially thriller and horror?

I’ve always been a writer at heart. I talk a lot about writing being my special interest as an autistic person, and that’s true. Writing is how my brain processes information and works through emotions, on top of it being my “safe space” where I feel seen, soothed, and understood. The fact that I write thrillers and horror seems like it should contradict that, but it doesn’t. I’ve always been drawn to horror—my gender dysphoria and social deficits have always felt “at home” in the horror space, so to speak, especially when I struggle to express my anger or upset in other ways. The tension and fear are cathartic.

And these days, I’m not just writing for myself anymore. I’m writing for my readers, especially my younger ones. It’s amazing how you can connect to the roughest, messiest parts of yourself and others through the lens of fiction…

***

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers, especially queer ones out there?

Be ugly.That’s the advice I give to every young writer, every queer or disabled writer just starting on their journey: be ugly. I was held back for years by a fear of being “bad representation”—I threw away complicated characters, flinched from messy topics, and denied myself the chance to become a better writer because I was afraid of how my work would impact the reputation of my identity group. But you can’t do that! You can’t let yourself become beholden to a bigot’s perception of you. You cannot make art attempting to stave off every single bad-faith perception that could ever be made of you. Tell the ugly truth of the situation, be honest and unashamed and unflinching, and you will go far.

Thanks for talking back to my brain worms, Andrew!